To say that I worshiped C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen would be an overstatement, but not much of one. I first met him in early 1991, if I recall correctly, although it may have been December 1990. Elaine Brennan, then managing editor of the Brown University Women Writers Project, brought Michael around the office one day. He asked questions about my use of XEDIT macros and REXX, about the Waterloo Sript we were using, and we discussed a few thorny bits of how our data might fit into the TEI (which had recently published P1.1). He was not just interesting, but also seemed genuinely interested. I will offer two vignettes from this period, either or both which may have been from this first visit, or a visit shortly thereafter. (As the WWP’s “TEI uncle”, Michael visited the WWP better than once a year.)

The image is all but seared in my mind: Michael is sitting at an IBM PC in our office (for those who remember the space, the West-most machine on the South wall; thus the window to the GCB space was to his right), wearing a light blue button-down Oxford shirt and a tie, with his sleeves partially rolled up. I was to his left, and Elaine was behind him. Michael was showing us something. He was using the N3270 software[1] to log into to the Brown IBM VM/SP mainframe on my account because, of course, he did not have his own account on Brown’s mainframe. I do not remember exactly what he was doing or showed us, but he had entered a slightly incorrect command. He paused. He cocked his head slightly. And here I need to pause, too, to tell you that both his institution (UIUC) and mine had recently switched from VM/370 to VM/SP. On the former system, the functions performed by each of the dozen PF keys (mapped to the function keys on the PC) were defined by IBM; on the latter system they were defined by the user, in this case me. Michael knew he wanted to press the key for “retrieve the command I just entered”. He knew that in VM/370 that functionality had been mapped to PF6. But would it be so in the new system? After the brief pause, he reached out and, without looking at me, decidedly pressed F6. He then looked up, saw it had done what he wanted, and turned to me with a silent grin, one of the widest I have ever seen. It was a “great minds think a like” moment. He had gambled that this kid would have done exactly what he had done on his home system — program the important function keys to the same keys IBM had used in the previous system — and won. I gave him a smile and a slight nod, and he turned back almost immediately and resumed typing commands, showing us whatever it was. I do not think Elaine even noticed this silent exchange between us, but from that moment on he & and I were fast friends.

The second vignette from this early 1990s era involves me describing our encoding system to Michael. To understand the profoundness of this story you have to remember that I was just a kid of 27 or at most 28 years, quite new to this SGML stuff.[2] I explained that we were using “:lb.” as the tag for line breaks, rather than the “:line.break.” (or “<line.break>”) that TEI P1 recommended, simply for pragmatic reasons. First, due to disk space (which was valuable back then). In some files I had well over 10,000 line breaks; in one I had over 20,000. At 10,000 line breaks the extra 8 characters would take up an extra 80 kilobytes! That would be an insane wsate.

The second pragmatic reason was screen real estate: many of our machines were limited to a width of 80 characters — those 8 extra characters represented 10% of the line width our encoders could easily look at at once. While I agreed in principle with the TEI’s general position that brevity was not as important as clarity when it comes to element and attribute names, for elements that occur very frequently (in this case over 43% of all elements) it was worth it, in my mind, to violate the general rule.

We did not speak of this issue again. But in the next release of TEI, the recommended element for encoding line breaks was “<lb>”. The TEI, personified in C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen, had not just listened to me, but taken me — a kid — seriously.

This generosity of spirit, and the firm belief that anyone might have something useful to contribute, was part of what defined CMSMcQ. I do not think I will ever stop appreciating him for that.

I knew early on I wanted to spend time with Michael. But Michael was an important, busy man. Any time we were both at the same conference there were dozens of other people vying for his time, scheduling dinner meetings with him, etc. But, to my joy and surprise, it turned out a) Michael wanted to spend time with me, too; b) no one was pressing him to meet during breakfast; and c) we each had a weakness for greasy spoons. So for many, many, years Michael and I would start each conference day by meeting for breakfast at a local joint, often joined by Paul Caton, and occasionally joined by others.

I could go on for some time about what a wonderful, brilliant, kind, compassionate, interesting, and interested person Michael was, and of how huge a positive impact he has had on my life. But I have already lost over two days of work crying over our loss. So I will instead reproduce here my notes for the introductions to CMSMcQ I gave in 2002 and 2004, and some of favorite photographs of him.

One set of photographs (one of which appears on the page of memories provided by James Cummings) — me & Michael in nearly identical outfits — deserves some commentary. What makes them so fun is that Michael and I did not plan to wear matching shirts and ties with red pens in the pocket, wearing our IDs in the same spot. I do not think either of us actually knew that the other had the same shirt and similar tie. We just happened to show up to the party one day wearing the same dress.

notes for introduction to CMSMcQ closing keynote, Extreme Markup Languages 2002

I asked the conference chairs for permission to introduce our closing keynote speaker for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that as the guy who has Michael’s old job I am one of the few people on the planet who can pick on him and get away with it.

When I told Lou Burnard I would be introducing the closing keynote speaker he asked “oh, and who would that be?”. I told him Michael, to which he responded “Ah! A man who needs no introduction.”, to which I responded “heh-heh-heh … that’s the point”.

Just to let you know how this introduction is going to go, I am not going to present you with a list or litany or enumeration of Michael’s extremely impressive achievements in our field … mostly because I want to leave Michael some time to speak; nor do I plan to impress you with his academic credentials, nor with the amazing array of languages he speaks including German, French, Rexx, C, C++, and java; nor will I wax eloquent about how I have the honor of introducing one of the giants in the field upon whose shoulders we all now stand; nor am I going to remind those of you who’ve been here before and inform those of you who have not of the fantastic closing keynotes Michael has delivered at each of these conferences save one since 1992, talks that have taught us, inspired us, taken that which we thought we knew or understood and placed it in a new light, and most of all, made us think … both about the strategic view of markup languages, text encoding, and computing infrastructure; and the thought “boy, he’s good — I wish I could give talks like that”; no, ladies and gentlemen, I am going to focus on one of Michael’s failings, on an area where Michael has performed not only a disservice to our intellectual community, but an egregious disservice, albeit one of omission rather than one of commission; some might go so far as to call it a crime against humanity, although I think a crime against humanities computing is a sufficient charge. What heinous act could he who I have elsewhere referred as a demigod have committed to receive such an accusation from one of his most devoted disciples? Well, none — remember, this is a crime of omission. What tiny omission then, might have upset me so that I would lash out at him to whom I, and many others in this room, owe so much? Did Michael fail to pay me back for the breakfasts I bought him last year? ([aside] yes Michael, you still owe me $10 CAD). Am I upset because Michael neglected to cite me in a paper? No. I’ve never said anything worth citing. Do I think it such a horrible omission that he never uses his first name? No. Perhaps his parents were a bit insulted, but I don’t care. BTW, an extra free [conference freebie] to the first person to guess what the “C.” stands for. Ladies and gentlemen, what Michael has neglected to do 9 times is to write up and post his most excellent closing keynote addresses. While it’s understandable — Michael writes the closing keynote during the conference, and is a very busy fellow — it is inexcusable. Many of us, after 3.7 days of an intense conference like this … I’m reminded of the Gary Larson cartoon: “My brain’s full, can I go home now?” … are not going to be able to remember the details of a presentation we are sure to want to share with our colleagues back home. To deprive those who happen not to be here of the well-articulated wisdom and insight that Michael routinely provides is truly dastardly. But I have a solution. A relatively low-tech one at that. Michael I plan to provide the tool for your redemption

[present pocket tape recorder]

[To CMSMcQ] No excuses now.

[Turn on tape recorder w/ a dramatic flair]

[To audience] Ladies and gentlemen, C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen.

notes for introduction to CMSMcQ closing keynote, Extreme Markup Languages 2004

I had the privilege of introducing the closing keynote speaker in 2002 — some of you may remember. In 2003 I asked the conference chairs if I could again enjoy this privilege. After a quick huddle, Deb Lapeyre came back to me and said “no, we’re worried that if you do it 2 years in a row it will become a tradition” — to which I said “so? … sounds like a good tradition to me!”

But in truth, coming up with a series of compliments sufficient in scope to describe Michael year after year could indeed be a daunting task. I usually sum up my admiration for Michael — and make no mistake about it, I put Michael up on a pedestal, where he belongs — with a single word: “demigod”, for I can come up with almost nothing bad to say about him. I’m sure, moreover I hope, that his physician has a few choice words that remind Michael that he is merely mortal, but to us in our field, he is a demigod.

Tangent: how many of you have done vanity searches? You know, type your own name into your favorite search engine to see what pops up? Come on, admit it, raise your hands … Well, sometime around October of 2001 I, at the urging of Allen Renear, conducted a vanity search. I actually think it was the first time I had done so. And you know what came up? The first half-a-dozen hits for “Syd Bauman” on the web in Oct 2001 were various people’s descriptions — not transcriptions, descriptions — of the closing keynote address at Extreme 2001 during which Michael had used audience members, of which I was one, to be props in his explanation of the differences between Topic Maps and RDF. I held a loaf of bread and a ribbon or some such. So … all of my own writings, all of the free (as in free speech) software I’ve made available, all of my photographs — of which there are a couple of hundred on the web — pale in comparison to my being a prop — a prop! — in one of Michael’s talks. And while that may be insulting, it is fitting. For Michael is a demigod.

But in preparing this introduction, I couldn’t, at least not on such short notice (about 13 months), come up with a clever poem or song that used the word “demigod”. But I note that Michael’s talk asks the question “does XML have a supermodel?”. I took this theme to heart in a way. So, with apologies to Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Kirk Alyn, George Reeves, Christopher Reeve, John Haymes Newton, Gerard Christopher, Dean Cain, and Tom Welling (although he doesn’t know it yet) I give you the following introduction.

Faster than a cable modem,
More powerful than X-S-L-T,
Able to grok ISO standards in a single glance,
Look, approaching the podium!
It’s a listener!
It’s a session chair!
It’s Superspeaker!

Yes. It’s Superspeaker, strange visitor from a middle-high German department who came to Extreme with thoughts and insights far beyond those of mortal geeks. Superspeaker, who can change the course of mighty committees, bend your brain with his mere words, and who, disguised as C. Michael Sperberg-McQueen, mild mannered editor for an evil consortium of web developers, fights a never-ending battle for text, data, and the X-M-L way.

Notes

[1] This is the only software we actually ran on those PCs, until, that is, Michael showed us KEDIT.

[2] That is to say, I was new to using SGML. I had been applying the principles of descriptive markup since 1983 or thereabouts, and had been introduced to the concept of SGML (by Steve DeRose at the corner of Brook and George on the East Side of Providence) in the late Spring of either 1984 or 1985 — yes, that was before SGML was published. But I had not actually used any SGML software until I came to the WWP.